Plants of the Northeastern U.S. Gallery

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6. Many urban street trees languish: poor soil, temperature extremes, damage from toxic substances and passing vehicles, pests and diseases, lack of growing room, and lack of water and nutrients all conspire against them. Still, one can find splendid examples of triumph in adversity. This red oak (Quercus rubra) thriving in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood may benefit from a leaking water main or other source of underground moisture. For more about the street-tree environment, see my Soils Gallery.

7. Tree togetherness. For all their structural integrity, woody plants have the ability to behave plastically; they slowly grow around and even encapsulate foreign objects they touch. When two trees come into contact, the tissues of the plants may form a natural graft, even though the two species are not closely related. These grafted trees, in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, are a black cherry -- Prunus serotina, dark bark and forked stem -- and a red maple --Acer rubrum.

8. In the realm between the tides, along the shore of Narragansett Bay. The seaweed known as wrack (Fucus spiralis) shares a rocky perch with bivalves, representatives of the animal kingdom. While they are often referred to as plants, the algae are now grouped in the Kingdom Protista. While some algae -- the green algae, to be precise -- were the evolutionary precursors of the plant kingdom, the brown algae, including wrack, represent a different evolutionary line of photosynthetic multicellular organisms.

9. A classic New England salt marsh, also on Narragansett Bay. Note the stone walls constructed by farmers.who had an all-too-ample supply of erratics (glacially transported cobbles and boulders) to choose from. Such tidally controlled habitats as this play a crucial role in the coastal ecosystem.

1. The white spruce (Picea glauca) is well adapted to the snowy rigors of the North. For one thing, its supple branches bend down to more easily divest themselves of their heavy load -- as the unwary winter hiker soon discovers. These trees stand along a oceanside path at Quoddy Head State Park, the easternmost point of the mainland United States.

2. Late snow clings to the branches of a windbeaten jack pine (Pinus banksiana) at Acadia National Park's Schoodic Point. The megasporangiate (female) cones of this species are often serotinous -- they open only after a fire clears the neighborhood of plants that would have competed with the pine seedlings.

3. Along the swamp boardwalk, at the Marconi Station section of Cape Cod National Seashore. The trees here are Atlantic white cedars (Chamaecyparis thyoides), renowed for their remarkably rot-resistant wood.

4. At Rhododendron State Park, in the Cheshire County town of Fitzwilliam. This is northernmost station of wild rosebay rhododendrons (Rhododendron maximum) in the Northeast. In early July, when these great shrubs are in flower, the hum of bees is almost deafening.

5. A living toupee, on a block of conglomerate in the Shawangunk Mountains near New Paltz. The rock polypody fern (Polypodium virginianum) should be the official plant of this region's geologists, because it's exceedingly fond of boulders and stone ledges.